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Mitts off!!: Chosen Frozen-- part 3

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Sandra Tsing Loh gets a large freezer chest where she can finally store those 14-inch Costco pizzas and more.

I got what I wanted for Christmas.

It was—drumroll—a freezer.

But not just any freezer. I’m talking one of those giant CHEST freezers that sit out BACK, not where serial killers store human BODY parts, but where I, a working mother, can EASILY store those OVER-large 14-inch pizzas from Costco, 50 ice cream sandwiches, six boxes of 20 hash brown PATTIES each-- Which may seem like a lot, but if my finicky 11 year old has three patties—the only FOOD she will accept these days-- those hash BROWNS will be GONE in a month.

Because you know what? Aside from driving my girls around—what with the staggered school SCHEDULES and all the peculiar DISTANCES—for SOMETIMES almost four hours a day—

As if in a dream, whether it’s at Trader Joe’s or Fresh ‘n’ Easy or VONS--I find myself buying what FEELS like the same bottle of KETCHUP or carton of milk over and over again. It’s like Groundhog day.

And so, standing over my NEW chest freezer, for 2012, I vowed, like Scarlet O’Hara, that not only would I now unabashedly freeze loaves of BREAD, I would never AGAIN run out of milk! I will NEVER buy less than four cartons at a time, and I will always freeze THREE!

The first two weeks were a dream. Children and friends and family and THEIR children dropped randomly by, they barely stepped INTO my kitchen and they were NEUTRALIZED.

I used as ARTILLERY pizza rolls, potstickers, Boca Burgers WITH the de rigueur super-thin wheat buns, along with spinach pancakes, blueberry cheese blintzes, corn and peas and carrots even, at one point—shazam!--a whole mess of flash-frozen TILAPIA. I say, if you can’t have dinner on the table in 20 minutes for nine and a half people. . . You don’t have a chest freezer!

Sure, my girls STILL kept running out of fresh underwear and socks-- But that only made me think: “Pants? Can you have a freezer for PANTS?”

Yes one CAN overbuy. I have been going so crazy at Costco, and I have so little time to fully unload, that my Volvo wagon TRUNK has become a kind of pantry. If we see a HOMELESS person at a stoplight, my girls always insist that I hand them a dollar. Now I also find myself calling out, “Sir?

Would you like a V-8?” Interestingly, even HOMELESS people will often DECLINE a V8 but WILL accept a frappuccino.

It’s the 99 percent helping the 99 percent -- Just so long as I keep getting my 30 percent Costco discount on 52 cans of V-8.